Dell to pump in $3 billion to further its IoT vision in coming three years

Dell Technologies has unveiled its Internet of Things vision and strategy which includes a new IoT division as well as new IoT-specific products, labs, partner programmes and consumption models. The company plans to invest a total of $3 billion in IoT over the next three years.

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, said: “IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works. Dell Technologies is leading the way for our customers with a new distributed computing architecture that brings IoT and artificial intelligence together in one, interdependent ecosystem from the edge to the core to the cloud. The implications for our global society will be nothing short of profound.”

The new IoT division will be headed by Ray O’Farrell, CTO at VMware. It will work on developing IoT products and solutions across the Dell Technologies Group.

O’Farrell said: “Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market. Our new IoT division will leverage the strength across all of Dell Technologies family of businesses to ensure we deliver the right solution – in combination with our vast partner ecosystem – to meet customer needs and help them deploy integrated IoT systems with greater ease.”

The company is already gearing towards its goal with the launch of a slew of new product development initiatives. Project Nautilus enables real-time ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways. Project Fire, a hyper converged platform and part of the VMware Pulse family of IoT solutions, offers simplified management, local compute, storage and IoT applications such as real-time analytics. Project IRIS, a security analytics offering, is under development by RSA Labs. The company is also investing in five start-ups dedicated towards IoT, AI and machine learning: Edico Genome, FogHorn Systems, Graphcore, Moogsoft, and Zingbox.

Some of the new IoT services initiatives include the IoT Vision Workshop, which identifies and prioritises high-value business use cases for IoT data, and the IoT Technology Advisory which develops the overall IoT architecture and roadmap for implementation.

What are your thoughts on Dell’s IoT investment and vision? Let us know in the comments.